Writer and Librarian

setting

It is freezing cold here today. But hey, we survived the polar vortex! The polar vortex totally played with my mind. The other day the temperature reached the mid-teens and I thought gleefully for a moment that it was so warm I didn’t need a jacket.

During days like today, I like to think of happier, sunnier times, like last autumn when I began visiting cemeteries. I’d come up with the germ of an idea for a novel that heavily featured cemeteries. The problem? I never went to cemeteries. Chalk it up to a typical fear of death and a lingering childhood aversion to walking on the dead.

I thought I’d be able to gloss over the setting at first and dive into the characters. My plan was to rustle up a rough draft and fill in cemetery details later. When I sat down to write, however, I found I couldn’t get a handle on anything – characters, setting or plot. So, I hit the road.

True confession – whenever I’m stuck on the page, I look for distraction. Rather than surrendering to Netflix, I visited a cemetery and congratulated myself on finding a distraction that I could write off as work.

Several details stand out from my first visit. The humidity, the towering pines, he dark tangle of forest beyond the stones. A spider scurrying over gray marble and a cannon inexplicably placed in the middle of the grounds. (Were they worried a rival cemetery would attack?) I got burrs on my jeans and when I got home, I felt the urge to wash cemetery dirt off my feet. I noticed that many of the graves were decorated with flowers, statues and even a few wind chimes.

Suddenly I had the opposite problem when I sat down to write again – I had too many details that I wanted to cram into the novel. But I also had a sense of setting and how my characters would interact in that setting. Score.

Barrier to the page: Can’t get a handle on the setting?

Solution: Stop streaming House of Cards on Netflix and immerse yourself in the closest thing to your setting that you can find.

(We’ll talk about how to immerse yourself in hard-to-visit and/or imaginary settings in an upcoming post.)

Discussion: If you’re a writer, where do you find inspiration for developing your settings? If you’re a reader, what makes a setting memorable for you?